Weighed and Wanting

When he and Vavasor were introduced to each other, he glanced at him, drew his eyebrows together, made his military bow, and included him among the listeners to his tales of exploit and adventure by sea and land.

Vavasor was annoyed at his presence—not that he much minded a little boring in such good company, or forgot that everything against another man was so much in his own favor; but he could not help thinking, "What would my aunt say to such a relative?" So while he retained the blandest expression, and was ready to drink as many glasses of wine with the new comer as he wished, he set him down in his own mind not only as an ill-bred man and a boaster, in which there was some truth, but as a liar and a vulgar-minded man as well, in which there was little or no truth.

Now although major Marvel had not much ordinary insight into character, the defect arose mainly from his not feeling a deep enough interest in his neighbor; and if his suspicion or dislike was roused in respect of one, he was just as likely as any other ever is to arrive at a correct judgment concerning a man he does not love.

He had been relating a thrilling adventure with a man-eating tiger. He saw, as they listened, the eyes of little Mark and Saffy had almost surpassed the use of eyes and become ears as well. He saw Hester also, who was still child enough to prefer a story of adventure to a love-tale fixed as if, but for the way it was bound over to sobriety, her hair would have stood on end. But at one moment he caught also—surprised indeed a certain expression on the face of Vavasor, which that experienced man of the world never certainly intended to be so surprised, only at the moment he was annoyed to see the absorption of Hester's listening; she seemed to have eyes for no one but the man who shot tigers as Vavasor would have shot grouse.

The major, who upon fitting occasion and good cause, was quarrelsome as any turkey-cock, swallowed something that was neither good, nor good for food, and said, but not quite so carelessly as he had intended:

"Ha, ha, I see by your eyes, Mr. Passover, you think I'm drawing the long bow—drawing the arrow to the head, eh?"

"No, 'pon my word!" said Vavasor earnestly, "nothing farther from my thoughts. I was only admiring the coolness of the man who would actually creep into the mouth of the—the—the jungle after a—what-you-call-him—a man-eating tiger."

"Well, you see, what was a fellow to do," returned the major suspiciously. "The fellow wouldn't come out! and by Jove I wasn't the only fellow that wanted him out! Besides I didn't creep in; I only looked in to see whether he was really there. That I could tell by the shining eyes of him."

"But is not a man-eating tiger a something tremendous, you know? When he once takes to that kind of diet, don't you know—they say he likes nothing else half so well! Good beef and mutton will no longer serve his turn, I've been told at the club. A man must be a very Munchausen to venture it."

"I don't know the gentleman—never heard of him," said the major: for Vavasor had pronounced the name German-fashion, and none of the listeners recognized that of the king of liars; "but you are quite mistaken in the character of the man-eating tiger. It is true he does not care for other food after once getting a passion for the more delicate; but it does not follow that the indulgence increases either his courage or his fierceness. The fact is it ruins his moral nature. He does not get many Englishmen to eat; and it would seem as if the flesh of women and children and poor cowardly natives, he devours, took its revenge upon him by undermining and destroying his natural courage. The fact is, he is well-known for a sneak. I sometimes can't help thinking the ruffian knows he is a rebel against the law of his Maker, and a traitor to his natural master. The man-eating tiger and the rogue-elephant are the devils of their kind. The others leave you alone except you attack them; then they show fight. These attack you—but run—at least the tiger, not the elephant, when you go out after him. From the top of your elephant you may catch sight of him sneaking off with his tail tucked between his legs from cover to cover of the jungle, while they are beating up his quarters to drive him out. You can never get any sport out of him. He will never fly at your elephant, or climb a tree, or take to the water after you! If there's a creature on earth I hate it's a coward!" concluded the major.

Said Vavasor to himself, "The man is a coward!"

"But why should you hate a coward so?" asked Hester, feeling at the moment, with the vision of a man-eating tiger before her, that she must herself come under the category. "How can a poor creature made without courage help being one? You can neither learn nor buy courage!"

"I am not so sure about the learning. But such as you mean, I wouldn't call cowards," returned the major. "Nobody thinks worse of the hare, or even the fox, for going away before the hounds. Men whose business it is to fight go away before the enemy when they have not a chance, and when it would do no good to stand and be cut down. To let yourself be killed when you ought not is to give up fighting. There is a time to run and a time to stand. But the man will run like a man and the coward like a coward."

Said Vavasor to himself, "I'll be bound you know when to run at least!"

"What can harmless creatures do but run," resumed the major, filling his glass with old port. "But when the wretch that has done all the hurt he could will not show fight for it, but turns tail the moment danger appears, I call him a contemptible coward. Man or beast I would set my foot on him. That's what made me go into the hole to look after the brute."

"But he might have killed you, though he was a coward," said Hester, "when you did not leave him room to run."

"Of course he might, my dear! Where else would be the fun of it? Without that the thing would be no better than this shooting of pigeons and pheasants by men who would drop their guns if a cock were to fly in their faces. You had to kill him, you know! He's first cousin—the man-eating, or rather woman-eating tiger, to a sort that I understand abounds in the Zoölogical Gardens called English society; if the woman be poor, he devours her at once; if she be rich he marries her, and eats her slowly up at his ease in his den."

"How with the black wife!" thought Mr. Raymount, who had been little more than listening.

But Mr. Raymount did not really know anything about that part of his old friend's history; it was hardly to his discredit. The black wife, as he called her, was the daughter of an English merchant by a Hindoo wife, a young creature when he first made her acquaintance, unaware of her own power, and kept almost in slavery by the relatives of her deceased father, who had left her all his property. Major Marvel made her acquaintance and became interested in her through a devilish attempt to lay the death of her father to her door. I believe the shine of her gold had actually blinded her relatives into imagining, I can hardly say believing her guilty. The major had taken her part and been of the greatest service to her. She was entirely acquitted. But although nobody believed her in the smallest degree guilty, society looked askance upon her. True, she was rich, but was she not black? and had she not been accused of a crime? And who saw her father and mother married? Then said the major to himself—"Here am I a useless old fellow, living for nobody but myself! It would make one life at least happier if I took the poor thing home with me. She's rather too old, and I'm rather too young to adopt her; but I daresay she would marry me. She has a trifle I believe that would eke out my pay, and help us to live decently!" He did not know then that she had more than a very moderate income, but it turned out to be a very large fortune indeed when he came to inquire into things. That the major rejoiced over his fortune, I do not doubt; but that he would have been other than an honorable husband had he found she had nothing, I entirely disbelieve. When she left him the widowed father of a little girl, he mourned sincerely for her. When the child followed her mother, he was for some time a sad man indeed. Then, as if her money was all he had left of her, and he must lead what was left of his life in its company, he went heartily into speculation with it, and at least doubled the fortune she brought him. He had now returned to his country to find almost every one of his old friends dead, or so changed as to make them all but dead to him. Little as any one would have imagined it from his conversation or manner, it was with a kind of heart-despair that he sought the cousin he had loved. And scarcely had he more than seen the daughter of his old love than, in the absence of almost all other personal interest, he was immediately taken possession of by her—saw at once that she was a grand sort of creature, gracious as grand, and different from anything he had even seen before. At the same time he unconsciously began to claim a property in her; to have loved the mother seemed to give him a right in the daughter, and that right there might be a way of making good. But all this was as yet only in the region of the feeling, not at all in that of the thinking.

In proportion as he was taken with the daughter of the house, he disliked the look of the fine gentleman visitor that seemed to be dangling after her. Who he was, or in what capacity there, he did not know, but almost from the first sight profoundly disliked him, and the more as he saw more sign of his admiration of Hester. He might be a woman-eater, and after her money—if she had any: such suspects must be watched and followed, and their haunts marked.

"But," said Hester, fearing the conversation might here take a dangerous turn, "I should like to understand the thing a little better. I am not willing to set myself down as a coward; I do not see that a woman has any right to be a coward any more than a man. Tell me, major Marvel—when you know that a beast may have you down, and begin eating you any moment, what is it that keeps you up? What have you to fall back upon? Is it principle, or faith, or what is it?"

"Ho, ho!" said the Major, laughing, "a meta-physician in the very bosom of my family!—I had not reckoned upon that!—Well, no, my dear, I cannot exactly say that it is principle, and I am sure it is not faith. You don't think about it at all. It's partly your elephant, and partly your rifle—and partly perhaps—well, there I daresay comes in something of principle!—that as an Englishman you are sent to that benighted quarter of the world to kill their big vermin for them, poor things! But no, you don't think of that at the time. You've got to kill him—that's it. And then when he comes roaring on, your rifle jumps to your shoulder of itself."

"Do you make up your mind beforehand that if the animal should kill you, it is all right?" asked Hester.

"By no means, I give you my word of honor," answered the major, laughing.

"Well now," answered Hester, "except I had made up my mind that if I was killed it was all right, I couldn't meet the tiger."

"But you see, my dear," said the major, "you do not know what it is to have confidence in your eye and your rifle. It is a form of power that you soon come to feel as resting in yourself—a power to destroy the thing that opposes you!"

Hester fell a-thinking, and the talk went on without her. She never heard the end of the story, but was roused by the laughter that followed it.

"It was no tiger at all—that was the joke of the thing," said the major. "There was a roar of laughter when the brute—a great lumbering floundering hyena, rushed into the daylight. But the barrel of my rifle was bitten together as a schoolboy does a pen—a quill-pen, I mean. They have horribly powerful jaws, those hyenas."

"And what became of the man-eater?" asked Mark, with a disappointed look.

"Stopped in the hole till it was safe to come out and go on with his delicate meals."

"Just imagine that horrible growl behind you, as if it came out of a whole mine of teeth inside!"

"By George! for a young lady," said the major, "you have an imagination! Too much of that, you know, won't go to make you a good hunter of tigers!"

"Then you owe your coolness to want of imagination?" suggested Hester.

"Perhaps so. Perhaps, after all," returned the major, with a merry twinkle in his eye, "we hunters are but a set of stupid fellows—too stupid to be reasonably frightened!"

"I don't mean that exactly. I think that perhaps you do not know so well as you might where your courage comes from. For my part I would rather be courageous to help the good than to destroy the bad."

"Ah, but we're not all good enough ourselves for that," said the major, with a serious expression, and looking at her full out of his clear eyes, from which their habitual twinkle of fun had for the moment vanished. "Some of us are only fit to destroy what is yet worse than ourselves."

"To be sure we can't make anything," said Hester thoughtfully, "but we can help God to make. To destroy evil things is good, but the worst things can only be destroyed by being good, and that is so hard!"

"It is hard," said the major—"so hard that most people never try it!" he added with a sigh, and a gulp of his wine.

Mrs. Raymount rose, and with Hester and the children withdrew. After they were gone the major rattled on again, his host putting in a word now and then, and Vavasor sat silent, with an expression that seemed to say, "I am amused, but I don't eat all that is put on my plate."

CHAPTER XXIX.

A BRAVE ACT

The major had indeed taken a strong fancy to Hester, and during the whole of his visit kept as near her as he could, much to the annoyance of Vavasor. Doubtless it was in part to keep the other from her that he himself sought her: the major did not take to Vavasor. There was a natural repulsion between them. Vavasor thought the major a most objectionable, indeed low fellow, full of brag and vulgarity, and the major thought Vavasor a supercilious idiot. It is curious how differently a man's character will be read by two people in the same company, but it is not hard to explain, seeing his carriage to the individual affects only the man who is the object of it, and is seldom observed by the other; like a man, and you will judge him with more or less fairness; dislike him, fairly or unfairly, and you cannot fail to judge him unjustly. All deference and humility towards Hester and her parents, Vavasor without ceasing for a moment to be conventionally polite, allowed major Marvel to see unmistakably that his society was not welcome to the man who sat opposite him. Entirely ignorant each of the other's pursuits, and nearly incapable of sympathy upon any point, each would have gladly shown the other to be the fool he counted him. Only the major, being the truer man, was able to judge the man of the world with a better gauge than he could apply in return. Each watched the other—the major annoyed with the other's silent pretension, and disgusted with his ignorance of everything in which he took an interest, and Vavasor regarding the major as a narrow-minded overgrown school-boy—though, in fact, his horizon was very much wider than his own—and disgusted with the vulgarity which made even those who knew his worth a little anxious every time he opened his mouth. He did not offend very often, but one never knew when he might not. The offence never hurt, only rendered the sensitive, and others for their sakes, uncomfortable.

After breakfast the next day, they all but Mr. Raymount went out for a little walk together.

It seemed destined to be a morning of small adventures. As they passed the gate of the Home Farm, out rushed, all of a sudden, a half-grown pig right between the well-parted legs of the major, with the awkward consequence that he was thrown backwards, and fell into a place which, if he had had any choice, he certainly would not have chosen for the purpose. A look of keen gratification rose in Vavasor's face, but was immediately remanded; he was much too well-bred to allow it to remain. With stony countenance he proceeded to offer assistance to the fallen hero, who, however, heavy as he was, did not require it, but got cleverly on his feet again with a cheerfulness which discomfited discomfiture, and showed either a sweetness or a command of temper which gave him a great lift in the estimation of Hester.

"Confound the brute!" he said, laughing. "He can't know how many of his wild relatives I have stuck, else I should set it down to revenge. What a mess he has made of me! I shall have to throw myself in the river, like a Hindoo, for purification. It's a good thing I've got some more clothes in my portmanteau."

Saffy laughed right merrily over his fall and the fun he made of it; but Mark looked concerned. He ran and pulled some grass and proceeded to rub the Major down.

"Let us go into the farmhouse," said Mrs. Raymount. "Mrs. Stokes will give us some assistance."

"No, no," returned the major. "Better let the mud dry, it will come off much better then. A hyena once served me the same. I didn't mind that, though all the fellows cracked their waistbands laughing at me. Why shouldn't piggy have his fun as well as another—eh, Mark? Come along. You sha'n't have your walk spoiled by my heedllessness."

"The pig didn't mean it, sir," said Mark. "He only wanted to get out."

But there seemed to be more creatures about the place that wanted to get out. A spirit of liberty was abroad. Mark and Saffy went rushing away like wild rabbits every now and then, making a round and returning, children once more. It was one of those cooler of warm mornings that rouse all the life in heart, brain and nerves, making every breath a pleasure, and every movement a consciousness.